About Me

I'm a director of Maidenhead United Football Club.
For ten seasons one of my roles at the club was to produce the match programme.
The aim of this blog was to write football related articles for publication in the match programme. In particular I like to write about the representation of football in popular culture, specifically music, film/TV and literature.
I also write about matches I attend which generally feature Maidenhead United.

Sunday, 19 February 2017

“Keep it simple, keep it quick, keep it accurate” is a phrase
most associated with double winning Tottenham Hotspur manager Bill Nicholson,
but it was originally uttered by Arthur Rowe the man who had created the
environment for Nicholson’s triumph, ten years previously at White Hart Lane.
In doing so he not only laid a template for Spurs forever ephemeral footballing
aesthetic but also planted the seed for England’s world cup triumph.

A Tottenham man by birth, Rowe grew up with the club spending
time with their nursery clubs Cheshunt and Northfleet United in the 1920s. The
Spurs coach at the time was Peter McWilliam, a Scot who brought with him the
passing tradition of making the ball do the work, for which his native country
had been renowned since Victorian times.

In Rowe he had a willing student, although McWilliam’s
departure meant by the time Rowe’s cultured centre half act was on show in the
first team in the 1930s he was suffocated by the dominant English philosophy of
kick and rush which he translated in these terms: “I never scored a goal for the first team.
They didn't like the centre-half to go too far over the halfway line in those
days.”

England recognition followed in 1933 but a cartilage injury
restricted his progress and he retired in 1939. Fate then intervened to create
a serendipitous invitation to advise the Hungarian FA on developing their
national game. The outward looking Rowe accepted and went onto consult with the
likes of Gustav Sebes and Ferenc Puskas in a meeting of
minds which promised much only to be cut short by World War two. However in
being able to discuss and develop his progressive tactics, Rowe was given the
confidence to implement his radical philosophy when peace returned.

This began at Chelmsford City whom he led to the Southern
League title in 1946, the Clarets almost following this up with election to the
Football League. His success was noted by his alma mater and he was appointed
manager at second division Spurs in 1949. What followed was in the words of his
Spurs captain Ronnie Burgess, nothing short of a “revolution”.

Rowe saw his ideas as the embodiment of the notion that
football was a simple game. Peppering his team talks with aphorisms such as “a
good player runs to the ball, a bad player runs after it”, Rowe emphasised the
importance of the short pass accompanied by swift movement off the ball as the
key to success. The style, to Rowe’s distaste, became known as push and run, featuring
a high frequency of wall passes, a term Rowe did approve of given how as a
child he had honed his technique by kicking a ball against an actual wall.

By its nature this required players to free themselves of the
strictures of their notional position, either to fall back from the forward
line to collect the ball, or attack from defence to pursue it.

For what would now be an overlapping full back, Rowe signed
Alf Ramsey, with the seeds of the latter’s World Cup winning wingless wonders
being planted as Spurs raced to the Division Two title in 1950, leading
throughout the season to win by a margin of nine points as the leading scorers
and best defence.

Twelve months later, Spurs were champions of all England,
winning plaudits for their breath taking football which reached its apogee in a
seven goal demolition of Newcastle United. They almost defended their title,
finishing runners up in 1952 but from this point on, faded quickly, a demise
which led to Rowe suffering greatly from anxiety and depression, resigning his
post in 1955 in the wake of an FA Cup defeat to York.

His success in developing instantly, with the addition of
Ramsey, an existing Spurs squad into an irresistible force for three seasons
created sky high expectations which he couldn’t maintain. However having imbued
his philosophy in his players Bill Nicholson and Eddie Baily he had created the
management team that would take the club to new heights in the early sixties,
winning not only the double and back to back FA Cups, but also England’s first
European title. In 1954 he had also signed Nicholson’s captain Danny
Blanchflower.

The fifties also saw the flowering of the managerial talent
Vic Buckingham (MWMMF 17) at West Bromwich Albion. He had been a team mate of
Rowe’s at Tottenham in the 1930s and considered him his mentor.

Rowe returned to football as assistant manager at fourth
division Crystal Palace in the late fifties, becoming manager in 1960 and
taking the Eagles to promotion in 1961. He again resigned due to the pressure of the job in 1962 but
soon reverted back to his assistant role, helping the club to another promotion
in 1964 as Palace continued a decade long climb to a first ever season in the
top flight.

Granted
a Selhurst Park testimonial, an honour not received at White Hart Lane, Rowe
drifted around the game into the seventies with spells at Orient, Brentford,
West Brom and Millwall. He had become something of a forgotten man, remembered
only by those privileged to see his team play in a pre-television era. This
proved to be a fleeting glimpse of what English football might have become, as
with the exception of the tantalising triumphs of Nicholson’s Spurs and
Ramsey’s England, clubs reverted to type.

Rowe summed up this
devotion to character rather than intellect saying: “All you need to remember is that 50 per cent of
the people in the game are bluffers. So a decent manager's halfway there when
he starts out.”

Wednesday, 8 February 2017

Having started on a mitteleuropa
trail that began with Meisl and continued with Hogan, Erbstein and Guttman, it
is inevitable that the last Hungarian to feature in this series is Gusztáv
Sebes, the man who coached the magnificent Magyars of the 1950s and changed
football forever.

The son of a cobbler,
Sebes was born in Budapest, and spent time in Paris working as a fitter for
Renault, playing for the works team Olympique Billancourt. However he spent the
bulk of his playing career with MTK Hungaria winning three League titles.

Following retirement
he was put in charge of the national team as the Deputy Minister for sport.
Influenced by the great Austrian and Italian national teams of the 1930s he
aimed to draw the majority of his players from one or two clubs. This was made
easier following the nationalisation of sports clubs under the post war Soviet
regime. The ministry of defence took over Kispest, renaming it Honved. Already
containing Ferenc Puskas and Jozsef Bozsik, the team was augmented using
conscription, with Sandor Kocsis, Zoltan Czibor, Laszlo Budai, Gyula Lorant and
Gyular Grosics. As the army team Honved could become the training camp for the
bedrock of the Hungarian national team.

Back at his old club
MTK, coach Marton Bukovi pioneered the use of the 4-2-4 or M-M formation, using
a deep lying centre forward. With this team providing the rest of Sebes eleven,
he then layered on his philosophy of what he called socialist football, and
what is now known as total football.

Essentially this
required every player to have equal responsibility in attack and defence, and
thus able to play in any position on the pitch. In practical terms this meant
developments such as overlapping full backs and a false nine. The stage was now
set for Hungary to rock the world of football.

Their rise to
prominence began at the 1952 Olympics staged in Helsinki. Hungary cruised to
the final scoring twenty goals and conceding just two, beating defending
champions Sweden in the semi-final. The gold medal was won with a 2-0 win over
Yugoslavia, and the watching head of the FA Stanley Rous was moved to invite
Hungary to play England.

The fixture was to
be played in November 1953. In the meantime Hungary won the Central European
International Cup. Sebes planned meticulously for the England game, using the
heavier ball favoured by the English, and a training pitch which matched the
dimensions of Wembley. He also played training matches against teams using the
English style.

With rising star
Nandor Hidegkuti scoring a hat-trick, Hungary stunned England with a 6-3 win,
the first time England had lost to a non British team on home soil. Also to the
fore was the brilliant Puskas, scoring one of his two goals with an amazing
drag back to leave captain Billy Wright flat on his back before firing the ball
into the back of the net. The fact that the match was important not just for
the result but also its introduction of a radical exciting way of playing the game
was symbolised by the commentary “here’s the number five and he’s not playing
centre half”. A few months later Hungary emphasised their superiority by
winning the return match 7-1 in Budapest.

By the time of the
1954 World Cup in Switzerland, Sebes’ team had been unbeaten for four years.
They sailed through the group stage and beat 1950 runners up Brazil 4-2 in a
quarter-final which became known as the Battle of Berne due to a post match
brawl in the tunnel.

In the semi-final they overcame defending holders Uruguay
4-2 leading to a final tie against West Germany who they had already beaten in
8-3 in the group stage. Puskas had broken his ankle in this win and was absent
from the following two matches but returned for the final.

Playing in heavy
rain Hungary were two nil up in eight minutes but the Germans had levelled the score
only ten minutes later. Hungary threw everything at the Germans hitting the
woodwork twice and having two shots cleared off the line but went behind with
six minutes to go. Puskas thought he had equalised in the dying minutes only
for his goal to be disallowed for offside. In a match mired with controversy
there were post match allegations that the Germans had taken performance
enhancing drugs.

Back in Hungary the
first defeat of the Golden team since 1950 triggered demonstrations which
goalkeeper Grosics believed sowed the seeds of the 1956 uprising. Grosics ended
up under house arrest whilst Sebes himself came under severe criticism. He
carried on in his post for two more years before being sacked. The Soviet
invasion of 1956 led to the defection of the team’s stars and by the time of
the next World Cup only four players remained.

The spirit of the
mighty Magyars lived on in the performances of the players in club football,
most notably Puskas at Real Madrid, and Sebes’ place in history is assured as
the man who drew together the threads spun over thirty years to produce one of
the most exciting teams the world has ever seen. Its fluid and flexible
philosophy endured most notably through Holland in the 70s and Brazil in the
80s before finally finding the ability to synthesise the aesthetic of style and
a winning ruthlessness in the modern day Spanish team.